Public Scale for Photoshop

In current news, which also perfectly ties into last week’s discussion and week’s prier, talks about having a public scale for images that have been photoshopped. The article talks about recent studies showing that after just three minutes of flipping through fashion and lifestyle magazines, women, of all ages, “feel bad and/or think negative thoughts about their bodies.” With this, Dr. Hany Farid and Eric Kee both professors at Dartmouth University, have been in the process of proposing a software that detects how much a photograph was been photoshopped. The scale ranges from 1 to 5, where 1 is a basic air bush to 5 being an extreme enhancement. However, there has been two every different sides to this software. First, models want to look their best, they want to be at 1, they do not want to have this image of not only being rated by the industry, but also by the people that look at their photos in the public sphere. Moreover, the majority of the people looking at these magazines is the younger generations, girls, aged 11-17. These girls are still developing their sense of the world, growing and maturing, and they need to know that these models in top fashion magazines do not always look the pore-less Amazon bombshells. The software is currently being used in the UK, which have banned all cosmetic ads that are photoshopped, due to the fact that this false advertisement. The question is now if this will be adopted by the United States and what other countries. And will this software, if adopted, change the industries current state?

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2 responses to “Public Scale for Photoshop”

This is really fascinating Eric, thanks for sharing! I knew that the UK’s adopted standard for retouching was more rigid than our own here in the United States, but I was always curious as to how they determined what would be fit to print and put before the public. Lesley jane Seymour’s statements about the awareness of readers & photoshop was also interesting, although widespread understanding of the extent of photo retouching still isn’t really going to aid in the fact that girls and women still react to retouched images with negative self-esteem because the unattainable standard is still being put before them. Dr.Farid’s algorithm really does strike a chord because, as he reminds us, just letting readers know whether or not a photo is shopped or not is too blunt and vague, a reader needs to know what they’re looking at and how much the human touch has effected it. The fact that the algorithm was tested out by people in order to train it is also fascinating because it brings in psyche and what we actually perceive, not just a computer following a formula.

I think that this is an extremely interesting topic that I wish we had time to discuss in more depth during class. This article is fascinating and I am really glad you posted! I agree that it is not beneficial to society for young girls to be bombarded with “fake” images of models. This is forcing developing girls to strive for something that is completely unobtainable. I think that regardless of whether or not this software is being used the viewer of the magazine needs to know that what they are looking at is not real. All advertisements, photographs and what not are edited to some capacity. If you think about it, everyone is enhanced by makeup of some sort.